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Do you think your peers at Chicago are 1.) more aware of the importance of going to the top school if, despite all advise to the contrary, they still want to go to law school? and 2.) are aware of the drudgery and general unhappiness that mark both a legal education and law work?
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<p>The way I see it, I think it has a lot more to do with Chicago kids tending to march to the beat of their own drummer and tending to appreciate the here and the now in the academic experience rather than the, "I'm just going to this school and doing this major so I have the best chance of getting into the law school of my dreams." Students who view college as a necessary evil to getting a well-paying job are not going to be served well by Chicago and they are not going to come here. </p>
<p>I realize that I'm assuming that "offbeat" kids have "offbeat" career goals, which is an unfair assumption, particularly because I know a bunch of "offbeat" kids with perfectly traditional career goals. However, I'll go back to a point I made earlier, that I have never felt any sort of mood or pressure to join any kind of career bandwagon. If everybody talked about how they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, and consultants all the time, then I think I'd feel some kind of pressure to have a career goal. But because these conversations don't really come up (or if they do, everybody has wildly different interests anyway).</p>
<p>It would be interesting to compare law/med/business admissions data with Chicago and schools that are more closely linked to Chicago through personality (i.e. Reed, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Vassar, Wesleyan, Brown, MIT) just to see if my hypothesis about the "offbeat" personality rings true. It would also be interesting to take each "offbeat" school's more "traditional" counterpart-- Amherst, Williams, Duke, etc. and compare things like:</p>
<p>A. What percentage of students from each of these schools apply to top law schools.
B. How this percentage of the student population relates to the student body as a whole (i.e. do the kids applying to top law schools tend to be stronger on average? weaker on average? representative of the student population?) My impression is that the most of best and the brightest are not interested in law school but rather PhD programs.
C. Some kind of LSAT/GPA comparison to see if across law school admissions boards, the name "Duke" or "MIT" means something particularly exciting that "Oberlin" does not.</p>
<p>I imagine retrieving this sort of data accurately would be impossible, but it's worth thinking about.</p>
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<p>Law school doesn't appeal to me because I feel like I know a lot of lawyers (and former lawyers) and I would not want their jobs. Perhaps if I, like CD's H, had a distinct idea of what I wanted to do, some related experience in that field, and knew exactly how a law degree would help me do it, then maybe I would consider law. I've considered a lot of different kinds of careers, though, and law has just never entered the picture.</p>
<p>FWIW, I do know happy lawyers. They are obsessed with their jobs, but they are happy about their obsession. I'd like to add this article to the lineup of must-reads about law school.</p>
<p>How</a> to Do What You Love</p>